Dreams Like Rain
by Picklesticks
Summary: When Gaara awoke, it was slowly, by degrees; nearly half an hour after he first stirred, he raised his head and looked at Kankurou. “I dreamed,” he said softly. “And it was like the rain.” Yaoi, Kankurou x Gaara, incest
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This fic hints at incest. If you don't like it, feel free to read something else.

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Kankurou remembers being scared of Gaara.

That was a long time ago and a different Gaara, a very different Gaara, a creature of blood and night, snarling at anyone who got too close and living surrounded by an air of latent violence, the heavy static feeling the same as that which preceded a sandstorm. It was no wonder no one had wanted to reach out. And those few who were forced to be close to him – Kankurou and Temari – had been targets for his unstable moods, living with constant, casual threats of death.

That had changed, though. Gaara had forced himself to change, had reined in the dark bloodlust that surrounded him. Had reinvented himself, carefully building from the outside in a shell of a more or less normal human being – albeit one that didn't sleep, that didn't flinch when a sharp blade flew at his chest, that didn't quite _fit _in all those little ways – until it became more and more reality. And as he changed, so too did Kankurou's emotions and attitudes toward him change. Where there had once been fear, slowly there came respect, and then affection, and then the love that had sent Kankurou running alone into the desert, face-to-face with the one enemy he could never have defeated, thoughtless of his own chances of survival. Gaara had changed into a brother, and a beloved one.

And now he would change again. Over the past two days, since Gaara had been given back to them – brought back from the dead by the woman who had cut him out from humanity – Kankurou had watched his brother's eyelids begin to droop, his motions lose their sharp edge of precision, his attention occasionally wander.

Gaara was getting tired.

Once, this would have been cause for extreme alarm. A normal human would die after about two week without sleep, but from what Kankurou understood, Gaara had been able to draw on Shukaku's power to refresh himself without sleeping, keeping the beast contained. But now, there was no Shukaku to draw on – or to repress. The long overdue sandman was coming for Gaara of the Desert, and while the carefully-honed instincts of seventeen years screamed at him to do something – slap Gaara awake, shove energy pills down his throat, _something _to get that droop out of his eyelids – there was also something almost endearing. Gaara seemed to shed years as he got sleepy, going from the calm and controlled Kazekage into something… softer, sweeter maybe.

But he was afraid. Gaara, whose only sleep had been the forced oblivion of a jutsu, had never simply let consciousness fade into dreams, and Kankurou could see with the eye of keen experience that Gaara was afraid to – afraid of the sensation, of the lack of control that drowsiness brought on.

When Gaara asked him, quiet and hesitant, if he would stay close by for that night, just in case – in case of what, Kankurou hadn't asked, aware that Gaara probably couldn't vocalize his feelings – he agreed, and Gaara joined him in his bedroom that night. Dressed in slightly-too-large, borrowed sleepwear, dark eyes at half-mast, Gaara looked like a child, like a little boy up past his bedtime. Innocent.

He settled into Kankurou's bed, and Kankurou joined him. Gaara didn't have a bed, had never needed one, and they were brothers. There was nothing wrong with the two of them curling up together, although once upon a time – not so many years ago – the mere prospect of being in this situation would have had Kankurou gibbering in fear.

Gaara was the only person who ever truly managed to frighten him.

Now, his little brother, the Kazekage, once the Ichibi's container and now once again a member of the human race, Gaara was curled up against his chest, drowsy but not yet asleep.

"Kankurou," he asked softly, "What is it, to dream?"

The question was not unexpected; Kankurou considered his answer, and then said quietly, "It's like the rain."

The answer was oblique, but Gaara nodded as though it satisfied him. "I've never dreamed," he said quietly, and Kankurou could gauge in those words his exhaustion; Gaara never said such self-evident things normally. "In the jutsu… there was nothing. Just a brief moment of it." And then he would awaken to destruction.

Kankurou slid an arm around his brother's waist, drew him closer. "You'll learn," he said quietly. "You'll learn what it is to dream."

They slept that night, and in the morning awakened, still curled together.

Kankurou was awake long before Gaara; with no responsibilities arising immediately, he was content to stay in bed and watch his brother sleep, a sight he had never before seen. Everything that had been written across Gaara's face while he was awake – the bloodlust of the young demon-tormented killer, the firm determination of the shinobi who wanted to live in connection with his village, the calm poise of the Kazekage – all of it had drained away, and Gaara's face was open.

Kankurou remembered abruptly that Gaara was only fifteen.

When Gaara awoke, it was slowly, by degrees; nearly half an hour after he first stirred, he raised his head and looked at Kankurou. "I dreamed," he said softly. "And it was like the rain." What he dreamed of, he didn't say.

In the days following, Kankurou often wondered when Gaara would decide it was time to buy a bed. But he didn't say anything; Gaara was happy to sleep beside him, and he realized that to ask Gaara about a bed of his own would in essence tell Gaara he was no longer welcome.

It was the last thing he wanted. In truth, Kankurou enjoyed it too – waking beside a warm, sleep-heavy body, knowing that Gaara trusted him to be the one watching over him as he slept, _him _and not anyone else. He liked that. He found contentment in it, and from the way the bonds between them deepened with every night they spent, Gaara's smaller, leaner frame fitting perfectly with Kankurou's larger, broader build.

And then Gaara had a nightmare.

Kankurou awakened the moment Gaara did; when you slept so close, and with a shinobi's hair-trigger senses, it was hard not to. The former jinchuuriki, who once had been a nightmare himself, was wild-eyed, and immediately fisted his hands in the undershirt Kankurou wore to bed, burying his face against his brother's chest and trembling with the emotion his subconscious had aroused.

Gently, carefully, Kankurou slid his arms around his brother and eased them both into a sitting position, holding Gaara close. "Shh. Shh. You're all right. Dreams are bad, sometimes, but they're still just dreams. It's not real."

Gaara just shook his head a little, and pressed closer; it seemed as though he would climb into Kankurou's skin if he could. "You were dead," he said quietly. "You were dead and your blood was on my hands. I could taste you." And he shuddered again.

"Hey," Kankurou said lightly, scrubbing a hand gently through disordered red hair. "A dream's still just a dream. I'm right here, and I'm not going to die. You're not going to kill me." A mood seized him, a thought, and he pressed a brotherly kiss into those strands, a little touch. Something to tell Gaara that things were all right.

Gaara stopped, looked up at him, and there was something growing in those eyes that Kankurou couldn't name. Something whose origins had been forged between them as fear and manipulation slowly gave way to understanding, respect, and affection. And then those origins, that seed, had been planted when Gaara was captured, had been watered and tended for the past week of nights that they had slept twined together, and now… and now that seed was blooming.

"You kissed me," Gaara said uncertainly. He didn't sound upset, though. "…Why?"

"Because you deserved it," Kankurou replied simply, not knowing where this would take them, but unwilling to back down.

"Do you…" Gaara hesitated. "Do you love me?" And in his eyes, Kankurou saw a child, alone and isolated.

It was to that child he answered without hesitation. "Yes." He didn't know how much Gaara understood of the simple human emotions that bound people together, didn't know if Gaara was conflating the brotherly kiss with more passionate contacts, wasn't sure how related the two questions really were anyway. But he knew that he loved Gaara.

"I…" Gaara looked away. "I don't know how."

"It's okay." Kankurou shrugged a little. "I'll teach you. You've made a good start." He could still see Gaara's lingering distress from the nightmare, and it gave him confidence. The dream had been so upsetting… it meant that Gaara had those connections in place already. He just needed to learn them and learn to express them.

Everything would be okay.


	2. Chapter 2

Gaara's newfound need to sleep – and the ability to do so without putting everyone else in the village at risk – was not the only change that occurred after he returned to the village

Gaara's newfound need to sleep – and the ability to do so without putting everyone else in the village at risk – was not the only change that occurred after he returned to the village.

His stamina was suddenly much lower, for one thing; lacking Shukaku's massive chakra, he could no longer waste power on flashy techniques or the sort of massive overkill he had tended to specialize in before. His own stamina was not inconsiderable, but it was human chakra, and Gaara worked himself nearly to collapse in training a few times before he started to learn how to keep track of his limits. To someone who was simply not accustomed to there being any kind of a practical limit on how much chakra he could use, it was a rude awakening.

Even worse was the discovery that the absolute defense was gone. That one had shocked Kankurou as much as it shocked Gaara. That sense of invulnerability – even if it wasn't complete, even if it _could _be breached by some people with frighteningly intense skill – had been as much a part of Kankurou's perception of his little brother as the dark marks around his eyes. Those, at least, remained, but the knowledge that Gaara was now vulnerable was chilling.

It wasn't just that the defense itself was gone that was the problem. Beyond that, it was also that because of having the defense, Gaara had never learned how to manage his own defenses. He couldn't dodge particularly well, had never had to weigh the balance of defensive and offensive strategy, had never needed to be alert to sudden attacks. The sand had taken care of all of that for him. Now, he needed to develop – and quickly – all those skills that most shinobi learned as children.

He and Kankurou took to sparring together in the evenings, after the sun had gone low in the sky and the day started to cool. Rather than using puppets, Kankurou would simply hold an assortment of weapons with his chakra threads, and Gaara would have to anticipate which one might attack him next, fending off the attacks with a quick pattern of counterstrikes. He had discovered that to replicate the cocoon of sand that the absolute defense had wrapped him in demanded enough chakra to make a simultaneous counterattack impractical, and so he trained on less demanding techniques. Then, too, Kankurou would instruct him directly in chakra management and control.

Gaara was not the only one having to make changes to his fighting style now. Karasu and Kuroari had been destroyed beyond salvageability by Sasori, and while Sanshouuo could theoretically be reconstructed, Kankurou had found himself rather loath to do so. Using the puppets constructed by someone who had collaborated in the attack on Gaara and had caused the deaths of many Sand shinobi was simply repulsive to him. Instead, Kankurou selected a single puppet with a different maker's mark from the storehouse where the creations were kept. Only one, because the limitation that imposed on him gave him more motivation to design and construct his own quickly.

The new puppet, Aoeki, was serviceable enough, even if it lacked many of the intricate systems that made the Akasuna puppets so phenomenally powerful in battle. It was simple truth that Akasuna no Sasori had been one of the most sophisticated designers to have ever lived – even if Kankurou now knew that he had also been one of the most twisted. It was a bitter thought. But having grown up learning that sophistication, working and becoming intimately familiar with the complex designs of Sasori's puppets, Kankurou's own design was developing a similar level of intricacy. As much as it bothered him to see the comparisons between the Akasuna puppets and the design he himself was developing, there was an inevitability to it; Kankurou would build a puppet he was comfortable working with, and he had long since become adjusted to and comfortable with Sasori's style of design. He just had to seek all the ways he could to differentiate his designs, so that he could feel that he was not developing into an imitation of the traitor.

Training together was good, though. It became a bonding exercise, a way for them to develop their brotherhood and friendship in this new post-Shukaku life. There was a saying that you could know a shinobi's heart when you fought against him and learned his strategy; if that was true, then Kankurou and Gaara were coming to know more and more of each other every day. Gradually, as Gaara's defensive abilities got more precise, Kankurou began using Aoeki in their training sessions; at first, he had insisted on only doing so after every bladed component of the puppet was scrubbed clean of the normal coating of poison, but it became laborious to clean off and later reapply the poison every day, and eventually Gaara convinced him that there was no longer a need.

Kankurou would never forgive himself if Gaara's death came at his hands. By all rights, he should have lost him already, to Akatsuki, and it was only by a great and miraculous gift that Gaara was among the living today. Not for anything would the puppeteer throw away that gift, because there was no doubt in his mind that there would be no second reprieve. But as Gaara's abilities caught up for the deficiency left behind by Shukaku's excision, Kankurou realized that his little brother was still ultimately quite worthy of the role of Kazekage. The ability to control the sand at will, while newly limited by a decrease in chakra, was otherwise undiminished, and Gaara was still one of the most powerful shinobi in Sunagakure, even though he was no longer all but invincible.

Then, one day, as they were settling into bed, Gaara said, "I'd like to take a mission soon."

Hearing that, Kankurou paused for a moment, one knee on the bed and the covers pushed back; no simple reaction came to him immediately, so he slid the rest of the way into bed, automatically sliding an arm around Gaara's waist and drawing him close. It was habit now to do so – to make the time they spent together in bed intimate. Gaara, who had spent so much of his life only knowing the touch of the sand, eagerly drank up every moment of contact like the desert sand absorbed water, and Kankurou savored the time they could spend like this, so close and warm. Loving.

"A mission?" he asked quietly, keeping his tone open.

"Mm." Gaara rested a hand palm-flat against Kankurou's chest, feeling the slow, relaxed beat of his heart. Thump-thump, thump-thump.

"…Can I ask why?"

The phrasing of the question made Gaara raise his head and give his brother a mildly puzzled look. Sometimes he missed nuances in wording, took things too literally. It was just his way. "Of course you can."

That made Kankurou laugh quietly. "Well, why?"

"I need to know if I can still fight." Gaara's voice was quiet, subdued. A far cry from what he had once been.

That brought a frown to Kankurou's face, and he said, "We've trained every day. You're still damned good."

"That's not the same. It's training. And I've seen the look in your eyes." Gaara looked up at Kankurou. "You don't want to hurt me. You pull back if it even looks like I might not have blocked a blow. I don't know how good I really am, because you won't go full-out against me." His words got sharper, louder, as he spoke. Then he stopped, sighed. "I just don't know."

The truth was, Kankurou had been going pretty close to full-out – although yes, he pulled blows that Gaara didn't immediately and completely block. That pale skin… it had only ever been broken once, when Sasuke had stabbed Gaara's shoulder with that lightning move. Kankurou didn't want to be the second one to draw Gaara's blood. Or the third, or the fourth, or anywhere on that list.

"Why?" Gaara asked softly into the darkness. "Why don't you push me harder?"

"I can't." The words were simple. "I can't do it." Kankurou's hand traced along Gaara's chest. "We almost lost you once. You… you were_ dead_. And…" It was hard to say this; Kankurou's not good at letting out his emotions. Misdirection, masking, a practiced theatricality, yes – but honest, genuine admission of his emotions? That was a harder thing. "I don't want it to be a slip of my fingers that kills you again. For good." There would be no second miracle.

Silence, from Gaara. And then he said softly, "Is that what love is?"

Ever since that night when Kankurou had pressed his lips into Gaara's hair, there had been a something growing between them – or maybe it was just Kankurou's imagination. He had felt it, had no idea if Gaara did. A sort of consciousness, perhaps, or better to say _self-_consciousness. Something that was thick and heavy and unspoken. Gaara's question prodded at it a little, needled it, and Kankurou nodded.

"It's a part."

Gaara did not seem surprised with the answer; rather, he accepted it and considered it, then murmured reflectively, "You don't want me to die. But more than that, you would feel worse if it were you who killed me, even if it was an accident with no intent." He didn't seem to be expecting a response, and so Kankurou remained silent, listening. "When I had that nightmare about having killed you, I felt that," the redhead went on. "It was… bad… that you were dead, but it was worse because I had killed you. It was worse than you being killed by someone else, and worse than me killing someone else." In the dimness of the bedroom that was slowly but surely becoming _theirs _instead of _Kankurou's, _Gaara looked into his eyes. "That is love," he said slowly. "Or at least a part of it. That's a part that I can manage. So…" His eyes flicked away for a moment, and then back. "So I can love you a little."

Somehow, his emotional mathematics seemed a little funny, but Kankurou understood – Gaara was reaching for an understanding by pieces, trying to break love down into something he could parse and match with his own feelings and behaviors.

He brushed his lips against Gaara's cheek. Another soft kiss, like the one after the nightmare, but… it was a little less brotherly, verging more into that thing that neither of them talked about or acknowledged. And Kankurou felt the weight of that intangible, unspoken _something _grow, and knew that it was because of him. But Gaara raised a hand to touch his cheek where Kankurou's lips had, and barely seen in the darkness, he smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

Normally, a Kage only took missions that were S-ranked, considered too dangerous even for most of the elite to handle, demanding the strongest warrior a village could put forward. But at his current level of skill, not entirely stabilized after everything that Akatsuki had done to him, it would have been foolhardy in the extreme for Gaara to have taken such a mission, if there had been one needing to be filled at the time.

Fortunately, there was no need to make the decision; no S-rank was currently available, and after some consideration, Gaara decided even to pass up an A-rank in favor of an easier, B-ranked mission. He and Kankurou would undertake it together; while it would not be difficult, and Gaara could almost certainly complete it on his own, Kankurou needed to test Aoeki in battle as well, and the rapport that had slowly been growing between the two of them over the past three years made it preferable to have company.

The mission itself was simple: eliminate a local crime boss in one of the countries bordering Wind. The man was known to have shinobi guards, but was himself a businessman, not a warrior, and with the guards taken out, would present little threat. Naturally, Gaara's advisors and aides had been rather put out at the thought of the Kazekage taking such a mission, but they had served him long enough to know that when his mind was made up, it would take more than protests of unorthodoxy and inappropriateness to alter the course he had chosen. So, confused at why the so-powerful Kazekage chose a chuunin-level mission, they nevertheless bowed their heads and made the appropriate arrangements so that the daily matters of paperwork and mission assignments would be attended to in the absence of the Kazekage and his brother.

The journey was slightly more than a day; Gaara and Kankurou chatted softly as they raced along the desert. Once, Gaara would have used his abilities to ease their passage, hardening the sand under their feet to a slightly less than stonelike consistency so that they could move faster; now, such a display of power was beyond reasonable for him, would in and of itself exhaust his human store of chakra. Gaara's power was no longer near godlike.

But even without that display of stamina to ease their passage, Gaara and Kankurou were desert-born, desert-bred shinobi; they knew how to travel swiftly and easily through the sand, and they did so, talking of simple matters as they went. Paperwork, an obnoxious businessman who sought to increase his water-use permit in order to import expensive plants from the lush Fire Country, a new training technique, the new batch of academy students who would soon be taking the exam. Kankurou had loudly and repeatedly stated his preference to a slow death from fire ants over ever being assigned a genin team, and while he was yet too young to take on students – at seventeen, he had at least another eight or nine years before he was up for that particular honor – he wanted to make sure that his brother understood his feelings on the matter well in advance. Gaara, well aware of Kankurou's distaste for children, assured him in the flat, nearly uninflected tone that only Kankurou understood as teasing that he would make sure that Kankurou got the brattiest, most obstreperous children Suna could offer, and at the soonest opportunity. In return, he was informed in highly colorful language that if that ever came to pass, he would spend the rest of his natural life needing poison tasters for every meal, and they'd better have good life insurance.

Three years ago, such brotherly teasing would have been impossible. Kankurou would not have _dared _to even jokingly threaten Gaara's life, and Gaara would have reacted to such teasing as though it were an honest threat against his life. Now…

…Now he could take it for the joke it was, understanding the little quirk at the corner of those purple-painted lips and the sparkle in Kankurou's eyes as being indicators that the words were nothing more than harmless play, and he could respond in kind, letting Kankurou know that every meal he ever ate would be filled with grit, sand mites would find his pillow a veritable palace, and he and his genin team of holy terrors would be given only the most malodorous of D-rank missions for life.

In response to which, Kankurou pointed out rather truthfully that his pillows were Gaara's as well, and that he'd be happy to share the sand mites with his brother. This point, Gaara chose not to refute; he could have threatened to move out and find his own bed with delightfully mite-free pillows, but somehow, that threat was one he would not make; it was too close to not joking, something that was too easily within the realm of possibility, and the truth was, he felt secure sleeping with Kankurou. After fifteen years of endless waking and only a few short weeks, less than two months, of sleeping at night, the simple act of descending into unconsciousness for seven or eight hours a night bothered him, and his dreams – with brighter-than-life vividness, as though to make up for the years they had been unable to torment him – disturbed and unsettled him. Waking up with a strong arm draped over his waist and a solid chest to lean against comforted him, and knowing that he was not alone as he slept – that Kankurou, long since adapted to a shinobi sleep pattern of easy and quick wakefulness, was there with him – made him feel safe. Gaara could not sleep lightly; when he descended into Morpheus' realm, he remained deeply asleep until his rest was completed, and it was difficult to rouse him before then. When he closed his eyes each night, he did so entrusting his safety to Kankurou, and the simple, brotherly act of sharing a bed took on a deep dimension of meaning.

No, Gaara would not abandon his brother's bed anytime in the foreseeable future, and he felt a quiet resistance to even joking about it. Unskilled at analyzing his own emotions, he did not feel the need to seek out more than the top layer of reasoning: he would not joke about finding his own bed because he didn't want to do so. That was all.

They camped for the night in the scrubby grasslands that marked the edge of the Wind Country's vast desert, and even without their normal comfortable bed, they still slept curled together, Kankurou's nose just brushing the nape of Gaara's neck as the stars looked down on them. The night in the grassland was warmer than in the deep desert; the air, richer with moisture, held more of the day's heat trapped within, and when they woke, dew coated everything around them.

Now, they traveled for little more than another hour before the village housing their target came in sight. It was deceptively small and sleepy, not the sort of place one might expect for a crime boss to hold headquarters, but then again, that was precisely how the man had evaded elimination for so long. Significant research had been required to track him to his lair, and now death was come for him.

Under _henge, _they slipped into the village, appearing to be nothing more than a pair of scruffy mutts, lean and hungry with dusty coats, trotting down the main thoroughfare – such as it was – and occasionally stopping to sniff around at anything that might offer a meal to a pair of hungry strays. One of the most important aspects of using _henge _successfully was to imitate the mannerisms that corresponded to the chosen appearance. While a couple housewives chased the off with brooms, no one suspected them to be anything but what they seemed.

Those housewives, however, were most emphatically not the innocent farm women they appeared; most of their men worked for Umida in one fashion or another, supporting the crime network that had spread across the small country and was beginning to penetrate into Earth and Wind. Gaara looked at them as accomplices, potentially guilty of supporting and aiding the man who would not live to see sundown. Without the head, the snake would die; he hoped the entire village would not need elimination. Bodyguards and boss, and that would be that.

The building that in a normal village would function as a sort of town hall, a meeting place for the villagers, a place for festivals, weddings, funerals, and all the celebrations of life in between, looked no different from any other on the surface, but inside, the two could sense the movements of shinobi-trained individuals, the highly developed chakra patterns easy to sense. However, that they were easy to sense told them much about their opponents; they were trained enough to use and develop their chakra, but not enough to then hide it; the two mangy mutts scratching themselves outside the hall would not appear to be anything else but to an intensely perceptive shinobi, or one such as the Hyuuga of Konoha, able to see through disguise. These men – presumably the shinobi bodyguards listed in the intelligence report – would not be so able.

Kankurou, appearing as a larger, shaggy black dog, sniffed around the doorway in a perfectly canine fashion; the disguised puppeteer glanced over his shoulder to Gaara and nodded once. A chakra technique sealed the door against spying, and as soon as they went through, whoever had sealed the door would know of it.

Assuming, that was, if they used the door.

It was no longer a throwaway gesture for Gaara, but it would provide them easy access; the sand slowly began to abrade away at the walls, the two of them choosing a spot that was hidden by a decorative bush on the outside, and revealed by tapping to be behind some heavy piece of furniture on the inside. As soon as the opening was big enough to admit the two dogs whose forms they currently wore, Kankurou's chakra threads carefully shifted the heavy piece of furniture – a cabinet, they discovered – far enough forward that they could slip in.

They found themselves in an office, listening to a man – Umida – upbraiding a subordinate for a sloppy job. The unfortunate one begged to be spared, to be given the chance to rectify his error, but his trembling pleas were cut off by the hiss of a drawn blade, and then a wet, meaty sound.

The smell of blood filled the air, and Umida casually said, "Clean that up." The unseen killer – a bodyguard-cum-enforcer, Gaara presumed – began to do so, and Umida sat back at his desk, closing his eyes and sighing. "Incompetence," they heard him mutter. "It wastes more money than bribes."

His bodyguard's incompetence in noticing the motion of the cabinet reinforced his words; Kankurou dropped the _henge, _braced himself, and leaped from behind the desk, flinging three kunai with deadly accuracy as he rolled.

The first was all that was truly necessary; it took Umida in the side of the head, and then the second and third buried themselves between his ribs on his left side. Then, quickly, Aoeki leaped from his wrappings and lunged at the bodyguard.

Only Gaara and Kankurou had dangerously miscalculated. There was not one bodyguard; there were five. One had stepped forward, bent over the corpse of a man bleeding out on the floor; the others stood against the far wall, eyes wide in shock but quickly recovering and readying an attack.

Kankurou set Aoeki leaping forward, the puppet lashing at the nearest guard, but with the simplistic puppet, he would not be able to take down all five alone. With Karasu – no question. That superior puppet had the weaponry to take on multiple opponents with ease. But Aoeki's limbs did not separate, and so long as the guards stayed outside the puppet's reach, there would be little armament that could touch them.

Kankurou had endeavored not to alter the puppet, preferring to focus his energies on the just-begun Shishi, his own design, but there had been one modification he had not been able to resist making. Like Karasu, Aoeki was now equipped with the ability to fire poison gas capsules, in order to have at least _some _long-range offense.

But again, luck was not with them. Behind the bodyguards were a series of fans, which moved cool air from the doorway into the office; poison gas would be blown back toward Kankurou and Gaara.

Gaara had followed Kankurou out from behind the cabinet, and the sand immediately lashed out at the guards – but slower, and in less quantity, than in the past. One guard died quickly, the sand forming a garrote and choking the life from him, but the others dodged out of the way and sent a hail of weapons toward the pair.

This needed to end quickly, before one of the guards could get to the door and escape. Kankurou knew the last thing they needed was for word of Gaara's presence to get out. He detached a single chakra thread from Aoeki and flung it toward the door, pulling it shut and holding it. Then, with his free hand, a quick flick of fingers to his brother, Suna shinobi hand-code. _Hold your breath. _To say it aloud would be to warn their enemies, who were currently concentrating on evading the sand, with a disturbing level of success. Kankurou himself took in a deep breath, pressed his lips together, then fired the poison capsules toward their enemies. The capsules exploded against the far wall, filling the air with a dark cloud of poison particles.

Immediately, two of the remaining guards began to cough and choke. But the last survivor, quicker than his fellows, leaped toward Kankurou and Gaara's end of the room, his face set in a mask of concentration. The fans began to send the poison back toward them, and Kankurou and Gaara whirled to deal with the last, both of them holding their breath.

But Gaara's new difficulties were once again made evident. Concentrating on catching the frighteningly fast man, he forgot once again about defense; a kunai flashed out, and he dodged a little too late, the blade scoring a cut on his arm.

Reflexively, he gasped, and then his eyes went wide as he realized what he had done.

The sudden surge of adrenaline – fear-shock-desperation flooding his system like a drug – made Kankurou react with sudden fury, Aoeki spinning onto the offensive and blade-arms burying themselves through the man's forehead and chest in that one bare moment of stillness. And then he flung the door open, catching his brother up in his arms and, taking a deep breath, rushed through the dissipating cloud of poison, desperate to get Gaara to fresh air. The puppet remained behind, forgotten.

Out in the fresh air, Kankurou laid Gaara down on the grass behind some ornamental shrubbery, digging frantically through his pack for the correct antidote. He refused to carry any poison for which there was one – or rather, Temari refused to let him, after he'd nearly killed himself working on Karasu several years ago – and he blessed that habit now, as he finally found the red-labeled bottle.

"Open your mouth." Gaara's limbs were beginning to shake, hinting at convulsions to come. Kankurou poured over half the bottle into his mouth at once, and Gaara obediently sealed his lips shut around the precious liquid. "Swallow," the puppeteer told him, but Gaara shook his head a little, his throat moving as he clearly tried and couldn't. "_Swallow!" _It was a pained cry, and Kankurou began to stroke Gaara's throat, trying to encourage it.

Finally, painfully, as the dark-rimmed eyes were beginning to roll, Gaara swallowed, and Kankurou sighed in relief. The concentration of the poison in the air had not been strong where they were, and the amount of antidote he'd given Gaara should cover it. But as the adrenaline rush faded, emotion flooded in to replace it – guilt and horror. He'd nearly killed Gaara. _He, _not anyone else, not an enemy, had very nearly ended that precious life that had been given back to them. How could he have? Why had he been so foolish as to use poison in that enclosed space? Kankurou struggled against the tide of anguish as he carefully lifted Gaara in his arms and made for home, knowing that the antidote – very nearly a poison itself – would weaken the redhead severely for another day or so to come.

"Gaara," he whispered softly, his arms tightening. "I'm sorry."


End file.
